Do you have Supplemental Results Pages?

If you have a website for your home based business, are some of your pages in Google’s supplemental results? Ok, first of all, what are supplemental results?

In general, they are a ‘2nd class’ results category that Google places some pages into. These pages seldom (if ever) get served up in the standard Search Results. So having lots of pages flagged as ‘supplemental results’ is not a good thing because web searchers will probably not find them (except for the most obscure of search queries). You can think of supplement results as Google’s graveyard of search results.

Naturally, these are to be avoided if at all possible. One way to tell if you have a lot of supplemental results pages is to use the site command in Google’s search box as follows:

site:mydomain.com

Substitute ‘mydomain.com’ for your specific domain. This command will list only the indexed pages for the website you enter. Look for where the supplemental results start (typically around Page 10 of the Search Results) and look for the entries flagged Supplemental Results (see example below).

Almost every site has at least some supplemental results so don’t panic if you see a few here and there. But you will want to look for a large number of these results in relation to the total number of pages indexed. Too many of these results could indicate larger problems and they certainly aren’t good from the perspective of getting those pages shown in Google’s results.

Exclusive Concepts has an upcoming webinar on the subject of supplemental results and how to get your pages back into primary results. You can register for it for free (link here). It’s geared toward Yahoo! Stores but even if you don’t have a Yahoo Store, it can help you to gain a better overall understanding of supplemental results and how to get out of them.